Selling High Holy Days Tickets Is a Dilemma for Synagogues

Tickets for the High Holy Days are “a huge issue,” said Amichai Lau-Lavie, center, the spiritual leader of Lab/Shul, a roving congregation in New York known for its use of the arts.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Let’s say that your religion considers one day a year to be especially holy. On that day, people complete a 10-day period of self-examination and making amends. Meanwhile, God decides what is in store for the coming year. Members of the community — even many who rarely attend services — gather to chant special prayers.

Now imagine that, to be there on that day, you have to pay hundreds of dollars.

That is the situation faced by millions of American Jews every Yom Kippur. At most synagogues, to attend services on that holiday, which this year ends Saturday night, one must have paid annual dues or have bought special tickets. The fees also cover tickets for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which was last week.

While nearly all congregations offer discounts or free tickets based on need, the regular ticket price can prompt sticker shock. To take an extreme example, Temple Emanu-El, on East 65th Street in Manhattan, charges $2,970 for the best seats, which includes annual membership.

Many Jews recoil from what they deride as the “pay to pray” model. Young Jews, in particular, often save their money and withdraw from religious life.

Recently, many congregations, worried about declining attendance, have begun to offer substantial discounts, even free seats. Donors sometimes step in, while some synagogues just lose money, trusting that the message of inclusion is worth the cost.

This year, for the first time, Metropolitan Synagogue, which meets in a Unitarian Universalist church in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, is asking people to pay whatever they want.

“The people who are of means need to be educated that in order to retain the unaffiliated, they have to help do their share in order to bring in their children and their grandchildren,” said Joshua Plaut, the congregation’s part-time rabbi. “They need to take bold steps, and quickly.” Older, wealthier members offered to contribute extra money, Rabbi Plaut said.

Of course there are expenses, and Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are the only days of the year when congregations have the attention of most Jews. The rest of the year, the doors are open, and most seats empty. Tickets have become a way to turn rare focus into needed bill paying, but they also stand in the way of bringing in newcomers. Therein lies the paradox.

Historically, Jews were expected to contribute what they could to support their local house of worship. Communal taxes could be levied, and sometimes the government helped manage communities, as in Napoleon’s “consistory” system.

In the United States, when religious organizations became responsible for their own fund-raising, churches could pass the hat on Sundays. But religious Jews do not touch money on the Sabbath. So other strategies arose, said Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian at George Washington University.

Many congregations turned to “what in Yiddish was called ‘shnuddering,’ which is selling off honors,” Dr. Joselit said. Congregations would auction off the right to say blessings over the Torah scroll. Members pledged money to be paid later.

By the postwar period, most American Jews abandoned shnuddering as unseemly. But two earlier trends had prepared Jews for ticket sales as a revenue stream.

During “the cantor craze of the 1880s,” Jews got used to paying hefty fees to see celebrity cantors sing in synagogues, Dr. Joselit said. Paying for these concerts helped Jews grow comfortable with synagogue ticketing, even for events on the Sabbath.

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The other trend, Dr. Joselit said, was “the overt commercialization of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, which takes the form of what today are called pop-up synagogues, but back then were ‘provisional’ or ‘mushroom’ synagogues.”

Before World War I, rabbis without regular pulpits “would rent out lodge spaces or movie spaces or catering halls, because there would be a sudden surfeit of interest” at the High Holy Days, Dr. Joselit said. Jews who wanted to connect with their tradition just for the High Holy Days would buy tickets for a congregation that met only 10 days a year.

Especially in the postwar era, synagogues moved toward a model of asking families to become regular dues-paying members. The membership fee would typically include holiday tickets, but charging nonmembers for tickets just to come on the holidays helped keep congregations in the black. The congregations that resisted charging were often tiny, with low overhead.

“We have no full-time staff, just a 15-hour-a-week administrative assistant and a part-time educator,” said Ilene Harkavy Haigh, the part-time rabbi at Congregation Shir Shalom in Woodstock, Vt., explaining how it could afford to offer all its services at no charge.

“We meet downstairs in the Unitarian meetinghouse,” Ms. Bloom said. And there is no full-time rabbi. “Our summer is made up of guest rabbis, student rabbis, guest speakers.”

When any congregation offers free services, nearby synagogues face competitive pressure. The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a Hasidic sect that has pioneered free holiday services, is offering hundreds in the United States this year. Kavana, a nondenominational congregation in Seattle, allows Jews who attend only on High Holy Days to fill out their own contribution amount on the Web.

But some Jewish leaders argue that it is spiritually unhealthy to act, for the sake of luring unaffiliated Jews, as if large communal events carry no costs. After all, the hall needs to be rented. The janitor has to be paid. The electric bill comes due. So not all rabbis believe that free services are the ideal model.

Tickets for the High Holy Days are “a huge issue,” said Amichai Lau-Lavie, the spiritual leader of Lab/Shul, a roving congregation in New York known for its use of the arts. “I was once of the opinion it should be free for everybody, before I realized that if it’s free for everybody, then some people are underwriting everyone else.”

So Lab/Shul started a crowdfunding campaign on the Internet. People paid to reserve seats for services at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, but their fees sponsored 100 free seats for others.

“I pay for yoga, I pay for therapy, I pay for the movies,” Mr. Lau-Lavie said. “I pay for things that feed my soul and nourish my body.”

mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail

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A version of this article appears in print on September 14, 2013, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Selling High Holy Days Tickets Is a Dilemma for Synagogues. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe